Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Ok, so if I enter wget into my shell prompt to download some copyrighted music, it makes me the creator?

> LLMs are prompted, they don't produce output out of thin air. Therefore the output is the creation of the human that triggered the prompt.

This is ridiculous. The “prompt” is merely a tiny parametrisation of a query that extracts from the huge database of (copyrighted) works.

Do read the links I listed in https://lwn.net/Comments/973578/

> The idea that LLM output cannot be copyrighted is silly.

😹😹😹😹😹😹😹

You’re silly.

This is literally enshrined into copyright law. For example:

> Werke im Sinne dieses Gesetzes sind nur persönliche geistige Schöpfungen.

“Works as defined by this [copyright] law are only personal intellectual creations that pass threshold of originality.” (UrhG §2(2))

Wikipedia explains the “personal” part of this following general jurisprudence:

> Persönliches Schaffen: setzt „ein Handlungsergebnis, das durch den gestaltenden, formprägenden Einfluß eines Menschen geschaffen wurde“ voraus. Maschinelle Produktionen oder von Tieren erzeugte Gegenstände und Darbietungen erfüllen dieses Kriterium nicht. Der Schaffungsprozeß ist Realakt und bedarf nicht der Geschäftsfähigkeit des Schaffenden.

“demands the result of an act from the creative, form-shaping influence of a human: mechanical production or things or acts produced by animals do not fulfill this criterium (but legal competence is not necessary).” (<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urheberrecht_(Deutschland)#Schutzgegenstand_des_Urheberrechts:_Das_Werk>)

So, yes, LLM output cannot be copyrighted (as a new work/edition) in ipso.

And to create an adaption of LLM output, the human doing so must not only invest significant *creativity* (not just effort / sweat of brow!) to pass threshold of originality, but they also must have the permission of the copyright (exploitation rights, to be precise) holders of the original works to do so (and, in droit d’auteur, may not deface, so the authors even if not holders of exploitation rights also have something to say).

The output of an LLM cannot be copyrightED. That is, there is no original creative contribution BY THE LLM worthy of copyright.

But the output of an LLM can be COPYRIGHT. No "ed" on the end of it. The mere fact of feeding stuff through an LLM does not
automatically cancel any pre-existing copyright.

Again, we get back to the human analogy. There is no restriction on humans CONSUMING copyrighted works. European law explicitly extends that to LLMs CONSUMING copyrighted works.

And just as a human can regurgitate a copyrighted work in its entirety (Mozart is famous for doing this), so can an LLM. And both of these are blatant infringements if you don't have permission - although copyright was in its infancy when Mozart did it so I have no idea of the reality on the ground back then ...

Cheers,
Wol

Even “mechanical” transformation by humans does not create a work (as defined by UrhG, i.e. copyright). It has to have some creativity.

Until then, it’s a transformation of the original work(s) and therefore bound to the (sum of their) terms and conditions on the original work.

If you have a copyrighted thing, you can print it out, scan it, compress it as JPEG, store it into a database… it’s still just a transformation of the original work, and you can retrieve a sufficiently substantial part of the original work from it.

The article where someone reimplemented a (slightly older version of) ChatGPT in a 498-line PostgreSQL query showed exactly and easily understandable how this is just a lossy compression/decompression: https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/

There are now feasible attacks obtaining “training data” from prod models in large scale, e.g: https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatgpt.html

This is sufficient to prove that these “models” are just databases with lossily compressed, but easily enough accessible, copies of the original, possibly (probably!) copyrighted, works.

Another thing I would like to point out is the relative weight. For a work which I offer to the public under a permissive licence, attribution is basically the only remuneration I can ever get. This means failure to attribute so has a much higher weight than for differently licenced or unlicenced stuff.